The Two Ma'at in the Judgment Hall weigh the heart of the deceased against a statue of Ma'at. Ma'at was the symbol of the cosmic order and it was believed that there were two of them: one for the living and one for the dead. Vignette from a papyrus depicting the Weighing the Heart of the deceased in a balance.
The baboon is one form of Thoth, inventor of writing and secretary to the gods, whose other form is as an ibis-headed man. He is usually associated with this scene in order to register the outcome of the weigh in. Above the balance is a block of written hieroglyphs extract from the spell 125 of the Book of the dead. Detail from a funerary papyrus dates to the 18th Dynasty (ca. 1550-1292 BC) of the New Kingdom of Egypt. Now in the Louvre.
Two bare-chested men on horseback wrestle. The goal is to pull your opponent off the horse so a part of his body touches the ground.
Three dogs chase a dummy clad in a fox or hare skin to see who’s fastest. Biting an opponent is grounds for disqualification.
And then there is this sport: “Each team seeks to throw as many goat carcasses as possible into the tai kazan (goal) of the opposing team.”
They’re definitely not Olympic sports but they are a part of another global competition: The World Nomad Games, held in Kyrgyzstan last September. That’s the landlocked central Asian nation of 6.2 million that, centuries ago, was a stop on the Silk Road traveled by traders from China to the Mediterranean. In modern times, it was part of the Soviet Union until it declared independence in 1991.
“Was the excellence of Socrates or of Shakespeare normal? Was it not rather abnormal, extraordinary? It is, I think, obvious in the first place, that not all that is good is normal; that, on the contrary, the abnormal is often better than the normal.”
— G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (via philosophybits)
